Buddhist teachings are full of sayings that one only understands once you've studied Buddhism a little bit. Buddhism does indeed teach that both desires and the misidentification of oneself as separate from the rest of existence lead to suffering. But catchy little stories like the one in the OP leave most novices scratching their head, or worse mislead them into thinking they understand something they don't.

There are many zen stories that take the following format : The student approaches the master and asks a question. The master replies, and at some point while the student is pondering what the master said, the master raps the student on the hand or the head with a cane or wooden stick. The story ends with, "And at that moment, [the student] was enlightened." The story is meant to convey that enlightenment is not found in the concepts in our minds, in puzzling over things, but in direct sensory experience. But readers get the idea that enlightement is something you "get," and you "get" it instantly and "keep" it forever. That's not really the way it works. Enlightenment is simply living in the moment â€” experiencing reality without overlaying one's judgements on top of it. It's something that needs to be learned, which is why people spend years, decades, and sometimes lifetimes meditating â€” to condition themselves to live "in the moment."

I've only met about 20 people who practice and they seem pretty level headed to me. Of course, they all attend the same zen center, and therefore have the influence of the same teacher. Tell me about these over-hierarchical zen-types that you've met. What's the deal, are they just super uptight about "rules" like the Noble Eightfold Path, and all that? Bear in mind, that there obviously needs to be some discipline involved in Zen, both to guide the student and to preserve the teachings accurately over time.

There's really three zen people that I've met and spent alot of time with that I can think of.

One I traveled with for awhile in Sicily 8 years ago. He was annoying. It was like a bad zen trip. The person seemed to be a novice, but was really deep into it and every 5 minutes was another koan, but it was obvious that being such a novice he shouldn't have been offering koans like that, as in he barely knew his own material, and it was all rote repeated cliches, which he thought was so profound. He wasn't entirely bad though. He was just a human being trying to find his way, yet I found him pretty annoying. Still I did learn a couple important things from him, but they were essentially unrelated to zen.

The next was an old man in his late 70s, who had been living in a forest in Tasmania for 20-30 years without electricity. I met him at a busstop in Nanaimo here and shared his company to Alaska. An interesting character for sure. He claimed to have been a friend of Jack Kerouac and I really have no reason to disbelieve him, but he also drove me crazy. In a previous life he was a psychiatrist in New York and a Catholic, then had gotten to know the beatniks like Kerouac and Ginzberg, spent some time at the Essalen Insitute experimenting with altered states of consciousness, then studied zen in monasteries in Japan and in India.

The next was a gardener I used to work with. Formerly a Catholic he got into zen and studied it in Japan. Then started a zen metal-band with no words. He recently took off to California at some monastery.